Pakistani Tribal Leaders Criticize West as Hypocritical for Opposing
Opium

June 1993

Faced with pressure to change their traditional livelihood of opium poppy
farming, Pathan tribal leaders criticized the West as hypocritical for demanding
an end to poppy cultivation while continuing to manufacture liquor, bombs,
missiles and other deadly products that are lucrative (Salamat Ali, "Opiate
Of The Frontier: Pakistan's Tribes Find It Hard To Give Up Poppy Crop,"
Far Eastern Economic Review, 5/27/93, p. 18).

Pakistan has come under increasing pressure from the West to curtail
poppy cultivation, although modest reductions in such cultivation there
have more than been made up for by huge increases in poppy cultivation in
neighboring Afghanistan. The poppy growing region of Pakistan borders Afghanistan,
where enforcement measures ceased entirely after civil war broke out in
the late 1970s. In Pakistan, the growers are from the Pathan tribe, which
was legally permitted to grow opium in the past as long as it was sold to
governmental authorities. Addiction has been relatively uncommon among the
tribal cultivators, but there are an estimated 1.7 million heroin addicts
in Pakistan.

Because the poppy regions are inaccessible by road, enforcement is almost
impossible and adequate intelligence, other than that gathered by satellite,
is unreliable. In addition, tribal poppy cultivators are heavily armed and
have vowed to fight fiercely to protect their age-old livelihood. There
is little optimism among international narcotics experts that opium production
in Pakistan and Afghanistan can be meaningfully curtailed in the foreseeable
future.